How one split-second decision can shatter so many lives
Katie was a caring, smiley university student from a loving family. Then one night, after going to the pub, she agreed to give a friend a lift home. What happened to her over the next ten months is a haunting illustration of...
ONE moment of madness, one terrible decision, that was all it took.
Who hasn’t had one of those moments, points in time when life appears to be running smoothly and then, all of a sudden, a choice made, or action taken sends everything heading in a different direction entirely?
And the repercussions can reverberate with dreadful effect.
Take Katie Allan — one day a high-achieving university student, in the third year of a geography degree, working two part-time jobs to support herself, using her weekends to help her grandparents around their home, looking for ways to make things better for those less fortunate than herself.
Then one evening she went to a party; not a raucous university affair, a party with colleagues from the cafe where she worked in Glasgow.
She never intended to drive that night; in fact, she left her car at the cafe while she went to the pub and enjoyed four pints of cider. But later that evening she had to return to the cafe to get the keys to her flat and when the business owner’s daughter asked for a lift home, Katie, who was four times over the legal limit, recklessly agreed.
A split-second decision. But the impact of that moment one summer’s evening in August 2017 is something that will strike at the core of every parent watching their child navigate adulthood.
For that night Katie knocked down and injured a 15-year-old boy, a youngster the same age as her own brother Scott, who was out running. Thankfully the boy, who suffered a broken ankle and fractured eye socket, recovered, but the accident was to precipitate a devastating chain of events that would culminate in tragedy ten months later, when Katie took her own life while in custody at Polmont Young Offenders’ Institution.
Katie’s death and the three months she spent behind bars are now the subject of scrutiny at a Fatal Accident Inquiry, along with the unrelated death of another inmate, William Brown, 16, also known as William Lindsay, four months later.
Five and half years on from her death, Katie’s parents, Stuart and Linda Allan, a hard-working, middle-class couple who never imagined they would end up here, are battling for the Scottish Prison Service to be held accountable not just for what happened to their daughter during her incarceration, but to be held accountable for all young people in detention.
As Linda said this week, Katie, who turned 21 behind bars, was ‘a fish out of water’ at Polmont. Her love of books, her resolutely good manners, the stream of visitors, all set her apart and made her the target of bullies.
‘Go hang yourself Katie, give us all peace’, was one cruel exhortation, which is just what the broken young woman did.
Yes, the prison service had a duty to punish their daughter, they say. But it also had a duty to protect her.
Linda, a former Scottish government advisor and an honorary clinical associate professor at Glasgow University, and Stuart, a sales reporting manager, are intelligent, reasonable people.
They know their daughter deserved to be punished for a reckless moment that could have been far worse. Nobody is more keenly aware than them that it should not have ended in this way.
‘What’s so hard about all this process is that we have spent five years fighting to remember our daughter before all this happened,’ says Linda. ‘She was just a shining light — a fun-loving, intelligent, caring, young woman.’
The last three months of Katie Allan’s life, played out in a courtroom this week, make for harrowing listening. Katie, a beautiful young woman with a mane of blonde hair, was so stressed it triggered alopecia, leading her to lose 80 per cent of her hair. Her skin was raw from eczema and her body covered in self-harm marks.
One prison warder held back tears as she told the hearing how she’d sneaked bandanas, against prison rules, into Katie’s cell, to help mask her baldness and protect her from the taunts
Speaking to the Mail, Katie’s parents recalled the happy childhood of their bubbly little girl, who played football every weekend and loved nothing more than throwing on a wetsuit and plunging into the cold waters of Arisaig, near Inverness, during the family’s annual trips to their caravan.
‘She was brought up in a middleclass area,’ says Linda. ‘But we were always very conscious of our children being aware that they were privileged, knowing that there were others that didn’t have the life they had.
‘She was just a joy; if there was anything that was detrimental it was that she sometimes put other people’s needs before her own.’
Stuart and Linda bought Katie a car, a sky blue Fiesta she named Chloe, but she was responsible for the running costs.
Stuart, the practical, protective dad, says: ‘We’d always be saying “don’t drink and drive, don’t drink and drive” and we never thought she would. But then one moment of madness . . .’ And there it is again. The moment around which a life turns.
It was approaching 10pm on an evening in August 2017 when two police officers knocked on the Allan’s door asking for Katie. There had been an ‘incident’, they said.
‘Our immediate thought was that Katie had been hurt,’ says Linda softly. Stuart followed the police (the same two officers who would arrive at the door ten months later to deliver the news of Katie’s death) to his daughter’s flat and witnessed her despair as she was led away in handcuffs.
She was kept in custody overnight and appeared in court the following morning, but parents of the defendant were not allowed in the courtroom because the victim of the accident was a minor.
‘There was a door with graffiti on it and I was told that’s where she would come out,’ says Linda.
‘So I sat on a wall watching for ages and eventually Katie came out and I just grabbed her . . . I just held her and she sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.’
Katie, says Linda, never shied away from what she had done, something evidenced by the fact
A chain of events that culminated in tragedy ‘Go hang yourself, give us all peace’
that one of her first actions was to write a letter of apology to the boy and his parents.
‘It’s interesting,’ says Linda. ‘After the incident happened, so many friends said “that could have been our daughter”. Children and young people make stupid mistakes and, you know, she did. She broke the law and if Katie hadn’t been punished, I think she would have found that difficult; she knew she had to be punished and she was full of remorse.’
The level of punishment, however, was something none of them were prepared for.
At meeting after meeting, the family was told that while a custodial sentence was possible, it was highly unlikely. But despite glowing letters from university staff and those who knew Katie, despite even a letter from the victim’s family pleading for clemency, Katie, who admitted dangerous driving while over the drink-drive limit, was sentenced to two years in prison — reduced to 16 months because of her guilty plea.
Linda, who was sitting behind her daughter, recalls the sharp intake of breath that seemed to ripple across the entire courtroom as the sentence was delivered. Linda’s remarkable composure momentarily crumbles as she recalls: ‘Katie turned round to me and said “help me Mum” as they were handcuffing her and taking her away.
‘Stuart and I left court immediately. I was crying and one of the partners from the legal firm came out and said “Don’t worry, it’s 16 months but it will be halved and she will only serve four in custody, she will be out in time for her next semester at university.
‘We were told nothing, not what prison she was going to, nothing, she was just literally ripped out of our arms, that’s what it felt like.’
As these determined parents know all too painfully, the nightmare had only just begun.
Katie’s tiny overnight bag (packed just in case) contained only one set of underwear, no sanitary supplies; the toiletries she had packed weren’t allowed and the only footwear she had were the smart black shoes she had worn with her new black trouser suit. From the start Katie’s vulnerabilities should have been obvious. Initially held at Cornton Vale prison, her admission notes recorded that she had previously self-harmed and suffered from alopecia and eczema. But in her assessment on arrival at Polmont, the inquiry heard this week that none of this was recorded.
‘No mental health issues,’ was what the admitting nurse recorded, along with noting Katie reported feeling ‘anxious’ about being in custody for the first time.
It was a week before Stuart and Linda next saw their daughter. If they were horrified at having to be patted down and having their mouths searched for illicit drugs, seeing the change in their daughter was much worse.
‘When I gave evidence I said she was like a rabbit in the headlights,’ says Linda. ‘And that’s what she was, she was so concerned about the impact of what was happening on us that she would smile and say she was fine.
‘But what we saw was different. Immediately her eczema had flared up and she was scratching her arms, within a couple of weeks her hair loss started.
‘To see your beautiful 20-yearold daughter’s blonde hair fall out in clumps, eyebrow, eyelashes... that was hard.’
Katie was sent books to continue her degree studies, but was told she had too many and had to give them away.
Stuart encouraged his daughter to make the most of any opportunities there were to stay occupied so she took a geography class; he chuckles as he recalls the class content — colouring in a map.
‘It was such a mix of different people on her floor,’ he says.
‘There were some violent people and Katie being, you know, from a working, middle-class background was pinpointed. She was targeted as being a snob.’
What’s abundantly clear is how palpably Katie wasn’t a snob. She made friends with an older woman prisoner (some adult female prisoners are held at Polmont), and baked a cake for her in the prison kitchens. The woman’s crime? Murder.
The student’s tight-knit family made sure there was a stream of visitors, every two to three days, to buoy her spirits. But the last visit — a Sunday afternoon, with Katie’s brother Scott, is one Linda will never forget. ‘The minute we got into the visiting hall, I knew something was wrong. She looked dreadful, exhausted, she had dark shadows under her eyes. She was almost vacant. I remember thinking, have you taken drugs, Katie?’
At first Katie, who was a month away from being released on home detention, insisted she was OK. And then the damn burst.
‘She burst out crying. I mean sobs,’ says Linda. ‘She told me that there had been a fight, a physical fight that day, and I said you’ve just got to stay out of the way, Katie. ‘Then I asked why she looked so tired and she said she hadn’t slept for three nights, that some of the girls had been shouting nasty things . . .’
Encouraging a vulnerable, acutely distressed, sleep-deprived young woman to take her own life arguably goes well beyond ‘nasty things’. It’s quite clear that for Katie, conditions had become intolerable.
Linda was so worried about her daughter’s mental and physical state, she spoke to a prison officer before leaving. ‘Don’t worry’ she was told.
Only later did Linda learn that the prison’s response to Katie’s anguish was to tell her she would be moved to the adult wing of the prison. If it wasn’t so heartbreaking it would be laughable.
Katie was found hanging in her cell the following morning. Katie left a brief final note in which she said: ‘I’m sorry it has come to this. I have let you both down, and Scott as a sister. I loved you very much.’
Everything Linda and Stuart have done since their daughter’s death has been about understanding what happened and about trying to make sure that it can’t happen again.
Lawyer Aamer Anwar, who is representing both them and the family of William Brown, has demanded Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf remove Crown immunity from the Scottish Prison Service, which exempts the service from prosecution for deaths.
As Linda says: ‘We are not asking for very much, just that prisons in a civilised society are held to account.
‘What happened to Katie could happen to any young person who makes a stupid mistake, a wrong choice, this could happen to anyone’s child.’
‘She broke the law . . . she was full of remorse’ ‘This could happen to anyone’s child’